sarsparilla

Although I was raised predominantly by my mother, I’m a lot like my father – and that extends down to my tastebuds. I had lunch with my father at his regular workday lunch spot recently and the waitress laughed when I ordered root beer. My dad followed suit. We both love it.

My quest for lactofermented soda actually started with a quest for root beer, but it’s a little more complicated than the apple/ginger guy I posted about yesterday, so I wanted to tackle it second.

I like to make it in small batches because I’m still tweaking the recipe, but this is the current incarnation:

Root Beer Ingredients:

8 cups water (filtered preferred)

3 tablespoons sassafras root bark (NOT POWDERED)

3 tablespoons sarsaparilla root (see above)

1/4 teaspoon of wintergreen leaves (chopped)

cinnamon stick

about 2 inches of ginger root (grated)

4 tablespoons vanilla extract

1 cup ginger bug (recipe here!)

1-2 cups sweetener of your choice

Do this:

In a heavy bottomed pot: add the water, herbs, and extract.

Bring the mixture to a simmer and simmer covered for 20 minutes.

Turn off heat, add sweetener and stir to dissolve completely.

Leave the pot covered for 30 minutes.

My favorite part of all the recipes I found involved cooling the root beer to blood temperature! Generally you want to cool it to somewhere between 80 and 90 degrees so as not to hurt your ginger bug. I found that I had to pop the pan into the fridge for about 20 minutes to get there. I also found that none of my kitchen thermometers got cool enough and I had to use my under-the-tongue medical thermometer. When your Root Beer has cooled, strain it to remove the herbs. To get it all out, your might need a jelly bag. Mine still has a small amount of plant material which will generally settle out.

Strain off a cup of your ginger bug liquid and add to the root beer.

Pour your soda into bottles (again, I’m a fan of swing tops like these). Allow it to sit in a warm or room temperature spot in your home for 3-5 days.

After 3-5 days of fermentation (watch for bubbles rising!), you will have root beer unlike one you’ve ever tasted. Sweet, herbal, and actually pretty good for you. Toss in a scoop of ice cream and enjoy!

Floating sticks!

Beware when opening! There will be foam!

Additional notes:

Generally speaking most, if not all, of the weirder things (sassafras, sarsparilla, wintergreen, cinnamon sticks, swing-top bottles) can be found at the home brew store. Mine didn’t have sassafras and I’m really into wildcrafting/foraging…soooooo I went for a hike and went looking for sassafras trees. The only ones I ended up finding were in a stand that had been planted about two years ago. I picked up some downed branches and yanked up a couple of seedlings that had sprung up too close to the main trees (as joggers stared at me, ha!) and brought them home. My first batch of root beer had chopped twigs (no leaves) and what little bits of root I could find grated into it. It wasn’t as strongly flavored as subsequent batches that were made after the root I ordered arrived….but I rooted one of the saplings (hopefully it survives) and in a few years I’ll have as much root as I can dig – and no joggers staring at me.